MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Over HTTP)

MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming Over HTTP) is a flexible bitrate streaming technique. MPEG has developed quite a few extensively used multimedia standards, including MPEG-21, MPEG-7, MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. Their newest standard MPEG-DASH, is an effort to resolve the intricacies of media delivery to various devices with an integrated common standard. When media content is delivered from conventional HTTP web servers, MPEG-DASH empowers high quality streaming of these media content over the Internet.

Just like Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) solution, MPEG-DASH can truly split a video file into small HTTP-based file segments before it is set to play through a stream. As a stream is playing, without causing disruption, each of these components can be combined into the stream.  Especially, this is suitable to users those are working on a sluggish network, because MPEG-DASH was developed to change up the bit rate delivery for these streams, giving users with a slower internet connection a higher speed rate.

For video content producers, DASH is an amazingly attractive technology. A unique standard which allows them to encrypt once, and then distribute securely to a wide range of players, from desktop through HTML5 or plug-ins to the mobile and OTT. Without any special provisions, it also enables the deployment of the streaming services by utilizing the existing inexpensive and wide-spread Internet set-up. It supports both live streaming and on-demand.

MPEG-DASH also works flawlessly with several DRM solutions, thus protecting the rights of sports and movie producers.

Example: MPEG-DASH is available on Chromecast, Smart TVs, natively on Android through the ExoPlayer, Netflix and YouTube already support MPEG-DASH, and various other MPEG-DASH players are also available.